Business is fairly slow in Gold Reef City, a history theme park built on the site of a semifunctional gold mine. Mounting violence and political instability are the fallout as apartheid totters on its last leg. The tourist trade has suffered as a result. Lunching on piri piri chicken in one of the property's fancy restaurants, we have the whole place to ourselves.

Tourists are notably absent, but noisy and bright-eyed African schoolchildren are out in force. Shepherded by frazzled teachers and tour guides, uniformed groups troop about, peering in the windows of curio shops and studying exhibits of turn of the century mining life. During a demonstration of African song and dance in an outdoor theater, some of the students sing along. Others loudly critique the performance. When they discover that one of us is African American, they switch to English and question her about pop stars like Michael Jackson and M.C. Hammer.

In this much-ballyhooed dawn of a "New South Africa," the tour guide segregates the groups, separating our handful of European and American tourists into the top half of a double-decker mine elevator, while crowding a large group of schoolchildren into the bottom. An American with a video camera expresses relief at the extra elbowroom.

The elevator slowly descends into the shaft of the gold mine. Daylight disappears, and we switch on lights atop the hard hats we've been given. The video cam's lights come on too, though there is nothing to see. But there is plenty to hear. Disembodied voices float up from below, eerily echoing in blended harmony, with intermittent shrills and ululations. Someone wonders if a radio has been turned on. We hush to listen. The children below us are singing "Shosholoza," a Zulu mining song. The cameraman turns up the volume, wishing aloud that he could videotape the impromptu performance.

To the mountainous mine dumps

The train comes from Zimbabwe.

You are running away

From these mountains.

The train goes to Zimbabwe.

We descend into darkness, the voices of these township-bred African schoolchildren reminding us that their fathers and grandfathers may well have labored in these very mines.

Communal singing and minstrel troupes

A cappella communal singing has long been central to southern African music. Long before European contact, traditional Nguni choruses sang in complicated call-and-response polyphony, usually accompanied by dance movements. A Christianized, westernized version of this music emerged during the nineteenth-century missionary period. And then, around the turn of the twentieth century, the "coon" shows came to town. The music would never be the same.

Both black and "blackface" minstrel troupes toured South Africa. None were more popular than the renowned McAdoo Jubilee Singers. Their performances had an electrifying effect on black South Africa. The troupe was led by Orpheus McAdoo, an ex-slave who had broken away from the Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1890. In the 1870s the Fisk singers had been the first African American choral group to undertake a worldwide tour.

Imagine the scene: The curtains are closed as the audience waits. Word has spread from Cape Town and Kimberly about these amazing black singers from across the Atlantic. The crowd is an eclectic mix: cattle keepers from the villages, migrant workers from the townships, and mission-educated wage earners from the cities. A few mixed-race people, "Cape coloreds" who have come east in the wake of the white Voertrekker migrations, are scattered among them. A handful of whites occupy choice seats in the front rows. Strains of music are heard, and every black, brown, and white face turns toward the stage.

The curtain opens. The McAdoo Singers take the stage, opening their concert of African American minstrel and plantation songs as they usually do with a choral performance of "Negro spirituals." The audience is captivated by a music that is at once foreign and familiar. "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child" seems to speak to their souls.

McAdoo's group was enjoyed immensely by segregated audiences wherever it sang: from the urban areas of Cape Town and Durban to the diamond-mining center of Kimberly and the gold-rush boomtown of Johannesburg to rural areas like Zululand. But the minstrel and spiritual tunes the McAdoo Singers specialized in found most fertile ground among the country's black population. One simplistic explanation offered in Eric Rosenthal's 1938 book The Stars and Stripes in Africa was that "the simple-minded black from the kraal was immensely impressed by the sophisticated dress of his brother from the far side of the Atlantic."

But sympathies actually ran far deeper. In African Stars (1991), German ethnomusicologist Veit Erhlmann writes of modern South African music: "The numerous parallels between Black American and Black South African humor, folklore, and popular culture were not only the result of concrete historic contact over a period of more than one hundred years. They were also based on similar experiences of racial discrimination and prejudice."

Taking the "coon" stereotype and turning it on its head, Zulu choirs reworked the crudely drawn racial images and infused them with elements of traditional and mission music to create a choral tradition they proudly called isikhunzi, the core word coon becoming a synonym for style and sophistication. Nattily dressed in high Harlem style, groups like the Pirate Coons and AmaNigel Coons sang minstrel favorites like "Oh Dem Golden Slippers" and also wrote their own tunes. Over the years this developed into the mbube style popularized by Solomon Linda's Original Evening Birds. Mbube is Zulu for "lion," and Linda penned "Wimoweh," the definitive mbube classic, popularized in the United States by Pete Seeger and the Weavers:

In the jungle

the mighty jungle

the lion sleeps tonight . . .

But it wasn't only Zulu musicians who became enamored of minstrel music. Among Cape Nguni cultures like the Xhosa, Christian mission hymns and minstrelsy met to form a style called makwaya. Working-class "colored" performance clubs with names like the Fabulous Orange Plantation Minstrels still parade their New Year's Coon Carnival through the streets of Cape Town, performing minstrel and jazz music in blackface [see THE WORLD & I, August 1987, pp. 458-71].

Choral music in the South African church

The African American influence continued well into the twentieth century with music such as ragtime and jazz as well as African American religious, social, and political movements. The architects of modern South African choral music were themselves part of this tradition. Reuben Caluza was a pivotal figure in this connection.

A Zulu, Caluza was a composer, performer, and choirmaster who became instrumental in blending indigenous southern African, European, and African American music to form a uniquely South African synthesis. Originally a teacher at Ohlange Institute, an independent black school based on Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee model, Caluza eventually organized bands and choirs throughout South Africa and the world. He performed throughout Europe. Caluza also studied at Hampton Institute in Virginia, and while there he organized West African students into a Zulu choir that would perform for the U.S. and French presidents.

Another significant figure was Ntsikana Gaba, a converted Xhosa chief, who fused Christianity with African song and religion in the early nineteenth century. Gaba authored many choral compositions that have been orally transmitted among the generations of Xhosa Christians.

The nineteenth-century hymn "Nkosi, Sikelel' i Afrika" (God, Bless Africa) symbolizes the best of African mission music. It has been widely translated and was chosen (and slightly reworded) by the ANC as its anthem. Many southern African countries have adopted it (as likely will South Africa) as their national anthem.

Nkosi, sikelel' i Afrika,

Malupakam' upoado Iwayo;

Yiva imitandazo yetu

Usisikele.

God, bless Africa.

May her horn rise high up;

Hear Thou our prayers

And bless us.

On the wings of that prayer, South African church choral music began to soar into the outside world, as did the religious experience that helped create it. Christianized Africans began to break away from the European missions to form their own churches. Some, like John Knox Bokwe and Charlotte Manye, were musicians who, like Caluza, traveled beyond the borders of what would become the Union of South Africa. These efforts initiated a merger between the independent church movement in South Africa and the African Episcopal Methodist (AME) Church in the United States.

Zionist churches were yet a further evolution of this movement: a blend of African ritual and Christian theology, typically led by a messianic preacher or prophet. Zionist congregations tend to worship outdoors, and they are a common sight in the townships, singing and praying in their flowing white robes.

As these forces flow together, syncretizing divergent streams into a river that still courses through today's choral music, both secular and sacred, it should come as no surprise that South Africans should take so easily to African American song. Like their cousins across the Atlantic, they represent something of an anomaly among African people, whose powerful rhythmic traditions tend to supersede the vocal. South Africans are first and foremost a nation of singers. They sing while laboring in mines, making merry, burying their dead, fighting, and struggling for a new society. This is true of African and "colored," rural and urban, Zulu, Xhosa, and all the seven other ethnic groupings that make up the black South African majority.

Indeed, whatever the differences among the principal black political movements--from the conservative Inkatha Freedom Party based in the Kwazulu Homeland (as Zululand became known under the apartheid regime's ethnically divisive policy of "separate development") to the African National Congress (ANC) and the more radical Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and Azanian Peoples Organization (AZAPO)--they all make music a central part of their public activities. Despite admitted friction between the ANC and Inkatha, a recent ANC rally in Durban, the Indian Ocean port in Inkatha's backyard, reportedly featured a number of Zulu choral groups. And nowhere is the emergence of the modern South African choral tradition better exemplified than in Zululand and Natal. Noticeably, this choral tradition is deeply influenced by African American musical forms, whether in the rural homelands, the urban townships, or the process of cultural interaction between the two.

South African music may have started its transition from homeland to township some centuries before, but as the incident with the schoolchildren at the mine illustrates, the transition is still in process. As South Africa's "Native Policy" (which later became "separate development") whittled black-owned lands down to 10 percent for over 70 percent of the population, rural Africans began to seek employment outside the reserves. But even before these settlement patterns began to shift, outside forces were already at work within the traditional music. Bits and pieces from the folk and religious music of European settlers, urban songs from returning migrant workers, and elements from the American minstrel performances had already begun to creep in.

With the mineral revolution--that is, the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley and gold on the Witwatersrand (the area around Johannesburg) in the last third of the nineteenth century--South African choral music was transplanted once again, brought into the emerging urban centers by rural migrants in search of employment and mission-educated Africans with middle-class aspirations. In the increasingly segregated townships, originally called locations, a new black urban culture was born from the mélange of groups and traditions that had been rudely thrown together to meet the labor demands of mine owners.

South African rap

It is against this background that the current popularity in South Africa of rap music, that distinctive cultural product of the postindustrial American ghetto, must be seen. In South Africa as in the United States, rap music has emerged as both an urban folk form and a protest vehicle for black youth embracing an insurgent, indeed openly insurrectionary, youth culture. But like their parents before them, they have reshaped this African American idiom into an art that is uniquely South African.

After brewing for some time, the South African youth rebellion erupted in 1976 into the Soweto Student Uprising, when students openly rejected an official edict imposing Afrikaans, widely seen as the language of apartheid and oppression, as the medium of instruction in black schools. Armed with placards, slogans, and freedom songs, children as young as eight faced the firepower of the South African police state. The result was hundreds dead and thousands detained or driven into exile.

But the rebellion continued, reaching its peak in the 1980s when, to the horror of many of their elders both within and outside the liberation movement, young people raised the slogan "Liberation before education," abandoned school en masse, and succeeded to a large extent in making good their vow to make the country "ungovernable." The result--one brought about also by the struggles of trade unions, civic associations, and other groups within South Africa as well as externally based guerrilla fighters and international sanctions--was a strategic retreat by the regime. It officially repudiated apartheid, legalized previously banned political organizations like the ANC and the rival PAC, released some political prisoners (among them Nelson Mandela), and set in motion a process of reform that will culminate in the elections on April 27, 1994.

In these circumstances, rap groups like Prophets of the City have emerged. Wildly popular among the youth, this group is celebrated for its entertainment and consciousness-raising value and as a potential voter mobilizer as well. As part of its voter-education campaign, the Centre for Developmental Studies, a unit of the University of the Western Cape (an institution established under apartheid for the "colored," or mixed-race, population), has been sponsoring a series of concerts featuring Prophets of the City. Dubbed "Rapping for Democracy," the Danish-financed program sends the rap artists into the townships to mobilize voters for the first nonracial elections in South African history. Persons eighteen years or older will be eligible to vote, though Mandela had argued in favor of enfranchising all citizens age fourteen and up.

The Prophets do not support any particular political faction. Its lyrics exhort black people to exercise their newly won right to vote, a right now enshrined in a new constitution after decades of dedicated, even armed, struggle. The young rap artists have adopted African American hip hop style: the dress, the dance, the intricate insignias clipped into their hair. Their message also has reverberations from across the ocean. For example, one of the Prophets paraphrases a line from a famous speech by Malcolm X: "The only way we can get the movement we want is by the bullet or the ballot. Now we have a chance to use the ballot."

The group calls on black youth to use that ballot as a means of improving their socioeconomic conditions and obtaining a better life.

The reason why we gotta vote

The government left us for broke

In each and every way

And now we have to say

Let us go for a better day.

In true African call-and-response fashion, the lead rapper urges the audience to chime in with "Vote! Vote! Vote!"

When one of us expressed amazement at how easily these youth have mastered rap, Sipho Sepamla, a South African writer who is director of the Johannesburg-based Federated Union of Black Artists (FUBA), remarked, "You Americans got rap music from Africa, you know."

Sepamla's point is well taken. Rap is certainly not a new art form. Older African Americans may well remember the oral culture from which rap evolved: stylized insult contests called "laying the dozens," folk rhymes about legendary heroes and bad men like Stagger Lee, Joe the Grinder, Shine, and Hambone. But few realized that these roots extend to West African oral cultures, whose traditions were retained in certain New World slave communities. A similar style of praise poetry recited both in chorus and solo, a cappella or accompanied by percussive instrumentation, is also indigenous to Zulu and Basotho music. It is quite possible that the world popularity of rap revived elements of such forms among South African youth.

In traditions like lithoko and lifela, mainly young, male poets boast of their strength and prowess, decorating themselves (as do African American rappers) with fanciful titles. Other forms of praise poetry are storytelling in nature, chronicling forces both sacred and secular: racism, religion, romantic love, the power of great kings. In What Do the Miners Say, Palisa Sebilo translated lifela lyrics composed by Basotho migrant miners.

1 swear you'll never see the Boer smile.

The best he can do is look in the

opposite direction, and laugh at you

When he faces you again,

He is declaring war, and fighting you

This, like other music forms from near and far, may well have made its way to Cape Town, the city where all roads lead. Cape Town is traditionally a leading entrepot of the commerce in goods, ideas, and culture between South Africa and the world, especially the world across the Atlantic. It was in Cape Town that the McAdoo Singers opened their South African tour in 1890. Even earlier, Cape Town had been the center of a vibrant musical community of Bantu-speaking South Africans; "coloreds," a mixed-race community descended from Europeans, the indigenous Khoi-Khoi, and Asian and African slaves; African Americans and West Indians; and sailors and adventurers from all over the world. An eclectic music tradition with elements of jazz, Afrikaner folk song, ragtime, minstrelsy, and mission music was born here. To this day, Cape Town remains the performing-arts center of South Africa.

Like so many South Africans before them, the members of Prophets of the City, who are drawn from the ranks of the city's numerically dominant mixed-race and African communities, have appropriated an African American musical repertoire, re-creating it to suit the specific circumstances in which they live and work. As the name implies, the group interprets the harsh social reality of township life and holds out the vision of a new, more just society organized on radically different lines from apartheid South Africa.

Indeed, the group illustrates well two of the central aspects of the modern black South African musical tradition. First, it reminds us of the importance of urban centers in the creation and re-creation, out of disparate groups from the countryside, of relatively coherent and self-conscious social formations. Second, it highlights the continuing dialectic between the African American and South African musical traditions, a process that has been going on for over a century.

Music and political culture

There is yet another feature of South African music that Prophets of the City has come to epitomize. The group's insistence on the centrality of politics in culture, that music must at once express social reality and subserve the struggle to change that reality--in short, that music should serve the cause of national liberation--is consistent with a philosophy of culture espoused by many South African musicians and artists since the 1940s.

This philosophy has expressed itself in both the political activities of the musicians and the music itself. In the early days of the new choral tradition, lyrics ranged from fairly apolitical religious and ethnic themes to decidedly topical social issues such as land losses in the Zulu wars:

We protest for our land

That was taken from us by the wolves.

But for the most part, the jazz and vaudeville groups that emerged on the urban cultural scene in the years between the two world wars, like the choral groups that had been around since the nineteenth century, tended to eschew open involvement in politics. The first attempts to link music and politics were made by political activists, led by the Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union of Africa, known as the ICU, a black union founded in 1919.

During its heyday in the 1920s, the ICU frequently invited jazz bands, vaudeville troupes, and choral groups to perform at its public functions, both political and social. Soon, other unions and political groups began to follow suit, including the ANC and the Communist Party. In 1943, for example, the ANC helped promote a vaudeville show that was written, produced, and directed by Madie Hall Xuma, the African American wife of the then-ANC president, A.B. Xuma.

The musicians themselves were not consciously using their music to promote political ends and were not necessarily committed to the ideals of the movements for which they performed. Nor did the music contain explicit political themes and messages. This would begin to change in the 1930s, as the government embarked on a legislative offensive aimed at whittling down black rights and liberties and closing off the already narrow political and social space in which nonwhites could operate.

This shift toward a more-politicized music mirrored similar developments in the political realm, as black politics became more radical and black cultural autonomy was asserted. One result was the conscious reincorporation of traditional African material into the music. As this movement gathered momentum, South African musicians once again looked across the Atlantic for inspiration. They found their model in Paul Robeson, a celebrated African American actor and singer who was known as much for his activism as his art. He was embraced by South Africans as one who had turned his back on white convention, going instead to the black folk tradition in search of raw material.

This trend toward culture as an agent for social change continues into the present. From trade unions to professional organizations and political movements, from voter awareness to the treatment of childhood diseases, songs exhorting social change are continually being composed and performed.

Choral music in the new South Africa

The choral tradition has undergone many transformations as it made its way from homeland to township and back again. Choral music undisputedly endures as part of the fabric of South African life. Organized choirs can be found in the schools, churches, workplaces, and townships. They perform in concerts and award competitions, on television, and in recording studios. Like Ladysmith Black Mambazo, they may occasionally break through to an international audience. But the street choral tradition, where impromptu choirs form and re-form in the townships nearly every night, appears to be dying out.

"We just don't sing as much as we used to," Sepamla laments. "It used to be that the townships were alive with singing. Now, the violence on the streets and the influence of TV are driving the music away."

With the expected election of a black government, will there be room for the choral tradition as a new South Africa struggles into being? Despite the fact that musician Ndikho Xaba has lived in exile in the United States for nearly three decades, he has remained close to his musical roots. Asserting that nearly every South African musician has cut his teeth on choral music, Xaba works to produce the choral effect in an avant-garde blend of jazz and traditional music styles. He believes that singing together is indeed the future of the new South Africa.

"We have grown with this type of existence," he says. "Harmony has been with us for a very long time. And it translates into democracy. In our perspective, we have room for many voices."